MATURITY MATTERS: HOW FIRMS GENERATE VALUE FROM ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE 

To better serve customers and cut operating costs, firms are instituting enterprise-wide efforts to leverage synergies and reap economies of scale. CISR research indicates, however, that before firms can use IT strategically, they must learn how to make IT a strategic competency. A firm’s learning about the strategic role of IT can be represented in four stages of enterprise architecture maturity, with each stage compounding benefits for the firm. In this briefing we describe how firms capture and formalize the learning from each architectural stage so that they can benefit from the current stage and, if appropriate, migrate toward later stages.